7.1 % Growth Announced for Kazakh Economy in First Half of 2011

At the enlarged meeting of the Government in late July, Kazakhstan’s Minister of Economic Development and Trade Kairat Kelimbetov summarised the results of the first half of 2011 and set priorities for an economic development for the remaining six months of the year.

According to Kelimbetov, domestic economy demonstrated a positive growth at a rate of 7.1 percent. The growth in the economy resulted from the increasing in industrial production by 5.8 percent, in the volume of construction work by 1.7 percent, in trade by 14.3 percent, and in transport services by 6.5 percent.

“High rate of growth was the result of implementation of Industrialisation Map project.” Kelimbetov commented.

As part of Programme for Accelerated Industrial and Innovative Development, 294 investment projects worth KZT 8.1 trillion (US$ 1 = KZT 146) are expected to be launched before 2014. These include more than 192 projects in 2011.

“The most important factor for a stable economic development is a control of inflation. In the current first six month of the year inflation level was 5.1 percent. In this sense measures preventing a significant rise in prices, such as tightening monetary policy, were taken by the National Bank,” Keilmbetov said.

More steps to improve business climate and reduce administrative barriers are currently being made by Government. According to the Minister, first, before the end of the year, the number of licences and permits to launch and run registered business will be reduced by 30 percent, along with the number of government’s planned audits. Second, in 2012, the Ministry will determine an exhaustive list of permits within the single law in accordance to their degree of hazards. These measures designed to ease and improve the process of monitoring of businesses and, in fact, will reduce the number of inspections.

“Another crucial area of development is going to be the development of agricultural sector, food security, rational use of land resources, development of livestock, and the revision of all agricultural lands,” the Minister reported.

The “People’s IPO”, programme that allows Kazakhstani people to participate in the equity of the country’s leading companies, is expected to further boost the development of the financial sector in the Kazakhstan. At the same time, Mr. Kelimbetov emphasised that anti-bribery measures and efforts to create reliable legal environment will be taken.

“Investment in the Future” is an another project designed to increase the quality of human resources, medical and educational services, to ensure save conditions for employment and provide further improvement in social sphere.

Finally, the Minister set up the main directions for the development in the second half of the year. According to Kelimbetov, his agency will work to ensure that all measures to reach indicative parameters of the development in the branches and regions are taken. Moreover, before the end of the year the remaining projects, some within the industrialisation map, should be finished. At the same time active projects like “Performance 2020” and “Improvement of Enterprises’s Competitiveness” should be further accelerated.

Concluding his report, Minister Kelimbetov said that the realisation of the stated objectives requires coordinated work of all the central and local executive bodies.

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Charles van der Leeuw, writer, news analyst, was born in The Hague, The Netherlands, in 1952. He started working as an independent reporter on cultural issues in a wide variety of publications back in 1977. Ten years later, he settled down in war-torn Beirut as an international war correspondent, following a first experience in Iraq in 1985, which resulted in his first book on the Iraq-Iran war. After his kidnapping and release in 1989, his second book “Lebanon – the injured innocence” came out, followed, in early 1992, by “Kuwait burns”. Later in the year, he settled down in Baku, Azerbaijan, as a war correspondent. “Storm over the Caucasus” on the southern Caucasus geopolitical conflicts came out in 1997 in the Dutch language and two years later in the first English edition. It was followed by “Azerbaijan – a quest for identity” and “Oil and gas in the Caucasus and Caspian – a history”, both published in 2000, and “Black & Blue” published in Almaty in summer 2003 about the stormy rise of Russia’s present-day oil and gas companies.
In 2012, he published a bipartite book about the histories of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. His latest publication before this work was “Cold War II: cries in the desert – or how to counterbalance NATO’s propaganda from Ukraine to Central Asia”, published by Herfordshire Press, England, along with books similar to this one on Kyrgyzstan, published in English, French and German editions.